Old headlines pop into my head at the oddest times. I was booking plane tickets for a family trip around the Fourth of July, noticing the difference in price from last year, and there it was, a 2004 Harper’s headline: “The Oil We Eat.”
We might as well belly up to the table then, because there’s nothing like a summer vacation with the kids for thinking about logistics and having one of those deeply suburban metaphysical trips where you realize that everything is connected . What’s happening at the gas pumps is a component of almost everything we manufacture, do, produce, package and transport. The Revelation of St. John the Dad, if you will. It doesn’t have to start anywhere more special than that, because all the roads converge. So, let us put on our parent hats, gather around the Formica table in the eating nook, put on our readers and frown at a legal pad, because as far as projections go, the horizon’s the limit.
It would be nice if one economizing family could turn the tide, but global supply chains are bigger even than the White House. President Trump ’s reflexive gesture toward American petro self-sufficiency does nothing to stop the rest of the world from seeing a connection between supplies and prices, and sinking more drills into American soil will do nothing to unstop the corridor through which all fertilizer, and thus much of Thanksgiving, will pass. We’re going to find out how much of a global supply chain coiled around a chain of hydrocarbons can get fed back to us the hard way. The common and constant pain of Trump ’s military blunder will stretch across the grocery store, from the eggs to the Tic Tacs, across the roadway needed to get there, and across the calendar, well into next year. In an economy this vast, there should be alternatives. And there are, despite what would seem like both parties’ best efforts. Maybe, like me, you welcome any excuse to take a train, see America and put the lowest possible dent in the environment. And maybe, like me, you laugh bitterly that traveling round trip from Tampa to, say, New Orleans by Amtrak costs $1,700 with two stops in Chicago. Then you sigh the bitterest of sighs and knuckle under to the fact that just driving there is 20 hours round trip and less than $300 in gas. Here you might reflect that your old four-door dreamliner’s maybe got one last big road trip in her. In an economy this vast, there should be alternatives. But even those taking their summer trip in the relatively rail-functional Northeast still have to pack food for the duration, and the grocery store is a monument to petrochemical diversity. Half the products on the shelves are packaged in them, and even the vegetables not already beneath a transparent layer of oil and bound to a cushion of foam extrusion of it get put in a thin and opaque bag of the stuff, just off the roller. Each was driven to the store on a tank of it anyway, assembled and packaged by it, planted and tended by it and, of course, fertilized with it. What’s there is costlier for being made with it during Trump’s Iran folly, and it’s costlier for all the things that were not sown, tended, harvested, packaged and shipped without it.
Many Democrats will want to drop the hot potato and reach for targeted tax breaks or temporary subsidies — whatever they can, in short, to avoid hard decisions about reordering what literally fuels everyone’s daily lives. The first and dearest temptation will be to ease our return to a broken and insecure system, and once again turn away from an opportunity to use a universal and systemic pain to demand a systemic evolution away from the chain of fossil fuels. There are other means, too, of sidestepping a problem by erasing its consequences: Washington has never stopped trying to cancel out one wrong by finding an equal one in the character or choices of its victims. While this is a default tool for the right, you can see it on the left in a kind of wised-up scorn for the reliably red agricultural sector, where the humble family farmer has become largely a myth. The less problematic caustic comfort for that wing of the party is that The Baileys, the imaginary Long Island couple that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer invented for the purpose of incarnating American oil dependency and anxiety — the one that he uses as his insipid policy lodestar — will get screwed by the system they were forced to buy into and used as an excuse to maintain. The nice thing about enlightenment is that it’s available to everyone. Epiphanies about the interconnected resource dependencies of global commerce, transport and the food supply are open to anyone willing to observe the current collision of logistics meeting geography. We can only hope that Iranian leadership can make some Lego videos explaining this to speed up the epiphany reaching our leaders’ finest minds. Because a person whose political journey began in 2024 can travel from anxiety about “what Biden did to the damn eggs” to realizing that everything in this economy is connected and tethered to a strand of water on a map. If you look for just a damn minute, it turns out everything’s eggs, and as fragile too.
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